


Baselines

by cloudy_blue



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Gen, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:16:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27704714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudy_blue/pseuds/cloudy_blue
Summary: Stuart comes forward with his bass held out between them. Paul looks at it and looks back at him, eyes narrowed like he’s expecting a trap."Why?” he says.“Because you’re gonna need a bassist,” Stuart says. “And I’ve got a bass."Or - Liverpool, 1961. Before he leaves for Germany, Stuart and Paul talk about basses and John Lennon.
Relationships: John Lennon/Paul McCartney, John Lennon/Stuart Sutcliffe
Comments: 8
Kudos: 56





	Baselines

**Author's Note:**

> This is very fictional. I wrote this as a warm-up to a longer fic I am planning and quite liked it. I hope you also like it!

“Knock knock,” says Stuart.

Paul looks up.

He’s sat alone in John’s bedroom, on John’s bed, in the dark. He doesn’t look even faintly embarrassed to have been caught.

“Saying knock knock is stupid,” he says. “You could just knock.”

Stuart grins at him. Paul’s expression falters; he smiles hesitantly back.

John’s window is open, most likely airing the room so Mimi won’t get upset about the cigarette smell on the curtains. From downstairs, the front room and the garden, the sound of the party is wafting upwards: Elvis on the radio and the chatter of girls below the window.

“Why aren’t you downstairs?” Stuart asks. Paul shrugs.  
“Why aren’t you? It’s your party.”  
“Yeah,” Stuart agrees. “I was looking for you, actually. I wanted to give you this.”

He comes forward with his bass held out between them. Paul looks at it and looks back at him, eyes narrowed like he’s expecting a trap.

“Why?” he says.  
“Because you’re gonna need a bassist,” Stuart says. “And I’ve got a bass.”

John and Paul have had this argument countless times since Stuart announced his intentions to leave the band and go back to Germany and marry Astrid – who should take over Stu’s instrument. It must be obvious to Paul that he won’t win, but even now, he visibly darkens.

“Why are you giving it to me and not John?” he demands, his lip curled in half a snarl. “I’m sure _he’d_ love something to remember you by.”  
“John would be a rubbish bassist,” Stuart points out. He sits down on the other end of John's bed and tucks the bass between his legs. “Doesn’t have the patience for it. And your rhythm section might as well have some talent in it, don’t you think?”  
“Pete’s not that bad,” Paul says, loyal to anyone over Stuart.  
“Not bad’s not the same as good, you’re the one who said so,” Stuart says. Paul rolls his eyes. “It’d be a lot easier for the other two to have someone they know won’t fuck up. Guitar’s only as good as the bassist, right?”

Paul looks distinctly unimpressed.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” he says. “We’ve had a bloody good guitar with an average at best bassist for two years.”  
“Well, you’ll be better than me in no time,” he adds. Paul snorts.  
“Won’t be hard,” he says.  
“I’m trying to do something nice for you here, McCartney,” Stuart says.

Paul opens his mouth, looks up, meets Stuart’s eyes and abates. He sits back against John’s pillows and lights a cigarette and then he offers one to Stuart. Stuart sets the bass down on the bed between them and takes it.

“Ta. Got a light?”  
“Here.”  
“Ta.”

They smoke in silence for a while. John is audible now through the open window, the sound of him, not what he’s saying, just his voice, his laugh. Stuart imagines him holding forth with one big hand wrapped around the neck of a beer bottle and the other making quick work of a ciggie and he feels very fond and very sad all at once. When he looks over at Paul, Paul has a tiny smile on his face, absent-minded, his John-face, pleased without realising.

"I'll want it back, anyway," Stuart says. "So don't change the strings round."

Paul glowers.

"Just bloody keep it, then," he snaps. "It's not gonna be sat around waiting for you to be done with whatever's in Hamburg."  
"My fiancée?" Stuart says, because he likes saying it. "My scholarship?"  
"Yeah, well," Paul says. "It's not fair of you to expect nothing to change when you go."  
"It's just a bass, Paul," Stuart says.

Paul huffs. Stuart pretends to look at the ugly curtains moving in the breeze. He'd always thought Paul was very striking. He's wanted to draw him since they met; he'd assumed he'd get a chance one day, when Paul warmed up to him, but Paul got colder and colder and the one time Stuart had mentioned it to John (John could talk Paul into anything, easy), John had roared with laughter and said there was no way Paul would sit still for long enough.

“Why do you hate me?” Stuart asks.  
“I don’t hate you,” Paul mutters.  
“What, it’s more of a very intense dislike?”

Paul glances over, sheepish.

“More like,” he agrees.  
“But why? I thought we’d be friends eventually.”  
“We’re not – We’re not not friends,” Paul says. “Right? I mean, if you needed something –”  
“Yeah,” Stuart says. He tries for a smoke ring but it doesn’t work. “But you’d do that for anyone, you would.”

Paul shifts, uncomfortable. He’s always uncomfortable with confrontation. On his less charitable days, Stuart thinks that must play a big part in the survival of his friendship with John.

“If it’s about me and John –” he says, because he might as well, because their lives are about to drift apart for who knows how long.  
“It’s not,” Paul says.  
“Because you’re John’s best friend,” Stuart says.  
“I know,” says Paul. He’s itching to pick up the bass, Stuart can see it, the anxious twitch in his left hand, just for something else to do.  
“I only joined the band ‘cos John wanted me to,” Stuart says.  
“I know.”  
“If I’d known I was stepping on toes –”  
“You’d’ve done it anyway,” Paul cuts in, coolly, “because John asked you to. You weren’t stepping on toes, Stuart, I’ve got a place in the band with or without you. _My_ place, not yours.”  
“I liked it,” Stuart says. “I know you didn’t think I was much good –”  
“You got better,” Paul says, slightly reluctantly. Stuart laughs.  
“Now you tell me.”

Paul grins, tucking it down into his shoulder.

“But I did like it. I liked the sound, I liked – I liked being the reliable note, the – the part the rest of it came back to.”

Paul scoffs.

“But you’d have more room to be creative, I guess,” Stuart says. “You’d hear it differently.”  
“You were quite boring,” Paul agrees, but he nudges his elbow against Stuart’s arm, gently, to take the sting out.  
“And I liked looking over at John and knowing he had to listen to what I was playing,” Stuart says, carefully, very carefully. “And knowing you were all depending on me to set the pace, you had to follow me and you trusted me to do it right.”

Paul doesn’t say anything. He leans over and tamps the butt of his cigarette out properly in the ashtray John has set precariously on top of a pile of books.

It has been quite a while since Stuart’s been in John’s room here. His presence is suffocating; he wonders at Paul coming up here alone, surely he feels drowned in it, John in the lingering smell of tobacco and beer and the aftershave he uses, John in his guitar in its case balanced against the wardrobe, John in the posters of Elvis and Bridgette on the walls – the idols, he’d told Stuart, laughing, one day early in their friendship and then Stuart had seen Paul, in the white coat they used to do their shows in, with his hair slicked back, and he'd thought, _oh_.

He does think, sometimes – John has never said so, but Stuart knows him, knows him well, and he does think, sometimes – John’s no fool, although he’s riddled with insecurity so perhaps he hasn’t noticed – But he must have noticed, the way Paul looks at him sometimes, it’s written all over him and he’s usually a closed book but with John, for John, he’s open and brimming with adoration.

At first, Stuart had thought perhaps that was the problem, that Paul was so desperate for John’s attention, his approval, that he would go along with whatever John suggested without particularly wanting it himself – whatever _it_ was, kissing, touching, Stuart didn't have a clue how far they’d gone together. And then he’d gotten to know Paul and although he could come up with a list of Paul’s faults right here and now (stubborn, vindictive, passive-aggressive), whatever frailty he’d sensed in their first few meetings had clearly been misleading. If he was giving John something, he was definitely willing to do so.

But really, Stuart still wasn’t sure they’d done anything at all. Perhaps they really did just disappear off to write the music that had started appearing everywhere – stacks of paper here, on John’s desk, a battered silver tin set down on top to stop them blowing away in the breeze coming in through the window.

It's just that there was such a heaviness between them – a weight that Stuart could feel, had felt himself sometimes, alone in a room with John, and it had usually ended with one of them pinned against the door or the wall or the mattress.

He wants to know. He really wants to know. But John has never said so and it’s a question Stuart has never been able to bring himself to ask. He doesn’t think John would answer if he did.

He always thought it was stupid, though, how jealous Paul had made himself, like it wasn’t obvious to everyone and their mother that, if it came down to it, John would have chosen him over Stuart in a heartbeat. And whatever intimacy Paul suspected they shared, the only reason he wasn’t a part of it was because John hadn’t wanted to risk their friendship, a risk he had been quite happy to take with Stu’s.

If anyone should have been jealous, it should have been Stuart. But he had learned very quickly that the only way to survive loving John was to do it lightly, eyes open so you’d see before you hit the ground.

Stuart leans forward too, nixing his cigarette beside Paul’s and then standing.

“Anyway,” he says. “If it can’t be me, it should be you.”

Paul swallows. For a moment, Stuart thinks he's going to ask - he's looking at Stuart with big eyes, nervous-like. Stuart had begun to think perhaps Paul was incapable of nerves. But then his gaze shifts, to his knees, to the carpet, the window, settling on the bass Stuart has left beside him on the bed.

“Won’t you miss it?”  
“Of course,” Stuart says which is the first time he’s admitted it. “But I can’t have both, and I’d miss art and Astrid more.”

From downstairs, there’s a big roar of laughter and then something glass smashing. John’s going to be in a world of trouble tomorrow.

“Alright,” Stuart says. “Well, it was nice being in a band with you. Sometimes.”

Paul smiles.

“Yeah,” he says. “Sometimes.”

At the door, Stuart risks it – he can’t help it, it’s as close as he’s ever gonna be able to get to the whole enormous weight of what they both want to know.

“Y’know,” he says. “I think John has a thing for bassists.”

Paul stares at him, impassive. Stuart smiles back. He hopes Paul will take it in the way it was meant, and not as an insult. He pulls the door gently shut behind him.

He’s barely gone two steps down the hall when he hears it, the low, familiar sound of his bass, his old bass, from behind the closed door to John’s room – Paul, picking out the notes to a song.


End file.
